B2B: Is Marketing Responsible For Everything, Including Sales?

B2B Marketers are trying to make everyone happy.

The CEO needs revenue. The sales team needs qualified leads. Customers need

information.

Everyone is looking at marketing to make it happen. If you’re a B2B marketer, you may feel

like the success or failure of your company rests entirely on your shoulders.

How did B2B Marketing become responsible for everything, including sales?

Is there a way Marketing can fix it?

This paper will answer those two questions but first, we must examine the evolution of

modern marketing that has brought us to this point. Nothing happened overnight but here

we are, feeling like we need to do more when in fact the solution may be doing less and

spreading the responsibility. First, some background…

The Pre-Internet Marketing and Sales Relationship

Before the emergence of the internet, marketing and sales groups performed separate, yet

complimentary roles. Marketing was primarily responsible for crafting and delivering

outbound marketing messages through various channels such as magazines, trade shows,

advertisements, etc. (Figure 1).

Upon viewing or receiving marketing information, prospective business customers, or

“leads”, would contact the manufacturer‘s sales organization (usually via an 800 number)

and request more information.

The sales group would take over and handle the entire sales process from giving detailed

product information to customer presentations and proposals. All was well in the world.

Responsibility was balanced and everyone was accountable for their part of the process.

Figure 1 – Alignment 101: Marketing and Sales had clear roles and responsibilities before the

Internet

Then Came Internet Marketing

The Internet changed things almost overnight. Since a company’s website was considered

just another form of media, the marketing group naturally took ownership. Early websites

were not much more than an electronic brochure anyway so the sales group didn’t see

value in it. Sales ignored the web, marketing embraced it. Internet marketing exploded.

Marketing owns Sales Central

Today the website has taken center stage in the B2B marketing and sales arena. Virtually

all marketing materials direct prospects to the company website where rich content awaits.

Marketers, wanting to promote the company’s products and services, are now publishing

sales material disguised as marketing material. Whitepapers, sales presentations (called

Webinars) and customer references (called Case Studies) are all published directly to the

web. Even offers of free trials and evaluations are now an internet marketing function

(Figure 2).

The net result is that marketing now owns sales functions for the company without ever having

asked for it. Think about your own situation. Is that what you’re facing?

Figure 2 – B2B websites now contain rich sales information, allowing prospects to bypass sales

Sales encourages the shift

The sales team has also helped push sales functions to marketing. It has not only ignored

this huge shift in buyer behavior, but actually accelerates it by encouraging customers to

“visit the website” for any information they need. Prospective customers are now

conditioned to just go get the information they need themselves, leaving sales completely

out of the process and making marketing responsible.

In summary, B2B marketers have slowly assumed responsibility for not only traditional

marketing functions, but many sales functions as well. Feeling pressure to generate leads,

they may actually be undermining their own efforts by publishing an increasingly large

volume of sales information that has no way of connecting to the sales team.

Enough about problems, let’s now discuss solutions.

Leveraging sales (and others) to achieve Company goals

Good business people know how to leverage their time and effort by delegating certain

tasks to others. Instead of trying to do everything themselves, they look for areas where

they can bring in other team members to help them achieve the overall goal.

Think about how the sales organization operates. In most cases there is a whole team of

people that help the individual sales person reach their revenue goal including, but not

limited to, marketing specialists, inside sales people, system engineers, product specialists

and product trainers. We just discussed how many of the tasks that sales used to handle

are now the responsibility of marketing. Why not look for a way to tie in and leverage the

sales team to help marketing reach its goals? The result would be true alignment where

marketing helps sales and sales helps marketing.

Put Sales to work for Marketing

So, how could sales help marketing? Having seen the friction between sales and marketing

for years, I can tell you that no amount of “lead definition” discussions will accomplish what

you want. You want sales to take ownership for their own benefit and to do that you must

figure out how to put some of the responsibility of whom they engage in their hands right up

front.

One idea that works is to re-think the offers on your website. Is marketing responsible for

the approval of all requests, even sales related ones? If so, are there ways to hand off the

approval of certain calls to action to one or more of the sales team members? This actually

solves two issues at the same time. First, it reduces some of the time marketing spends

managing certain requests and secondly, and most importantly, it encourages lead

ownership by the sales team. Sales owns the requests it approves.

Figure 3 shows how a Sales Approved Website Offer on a B2B website would work.

Marketing concentrates its efforts on conveying the benefits of the product to spark interest

and then creates offers that are approved by sales to get the conversation started. For

example, marketing may implement a self-service budgetary pricing service, but sales

should be responsible for approving requests. An inside sales person can view requests, do

basic research and then approve the request, pulling the lead in. The net result is that the

decision was made by the sales team, not marketing.

Figure 3 – Offers requiring sales approval can start the sales process and offload accountability

Now Crank It Up With Social Media

Once the offer(s) are in place to tie in the sales team, it is time to step on the gas pedal by

implementing social media campaigns. Interestingly enough, social media actually fits more

into the traditional role of marketing; providing benefit messaging and helping with brand

identity. Even though marketing is far from controlling social media (that’s the whole point of

letting communities interact), it can aid in providing islands of interaction for the

communities.

Establishing a corporate blog and presence on the leading social media platforms like

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is imperative for most businesses today. Reinforcing the

previous point about potential customers seeking self-service information, these new

methods of research are becoming common starting points for serious purchases. Many

companies are now generating more inbound website traffic from a handful of social media

sites than all other methods combined (figure 4).

Figure 4 – Social Media drives efforts are now offloaded and effective

Caution: Many B2B marketers are forging ahead with social media strategies without the

associated sales tie-in on their websites. This can lead to an overload of inbound activity

and no way to handle it. Marketing automation tools that support lead nurturing are handy

for non-sales oriented materials like whitepapers, webinars, etc. but it is imperative that

marketing have a way to filter serious prospects and tie-in sales immediately. Without a

clear way to split up the tasks, marketing will only be adding to its burden.

Summary

B2B marketers are carrying a heavy load. It seems everyone from the CEO down depends

on marketing to do it all – establish a brand, find new customers, help existing customers

and measure marketing ROI. The ironic part of all this pressure is that some of it may be

self-inflicted.

Marketing’s job used to be to generate customer interest and channel those prospects to

the sales team. By taking early ownership of the corporate website, marketing has gradually

assumed more responsibility and has allowed itself to be become accountable for more

than just marketing. Now, tasks that were handled by sales (presentations, customer

references, etc.) are now recorded electronically by the marketing team in the form of

webinars and case studies respectively. As marketing publishes more and more sales

content it is only natural that sales becomes less involved and less accountable.

To reverse this trend, marketers must rethink the goal of their marketing programs. Since

most B2B companies do not sell products directly on their sites, the first goal should be to

promote benefits so interested prospects will want to engage the sales team in a

conversation. Marketers must sell the conversation, not the product.

Tying in the sales team to share responsibility for the generation of potential customers is

the second step. One option is to use technology to implement approval based offers where

marketing still runs the programs, but the sales team has the responsibility of approving

requests. This puts skin in the game for the sales team and promotes prospect ownership.

With sales being more intimately involved with the handling of website leads, marketers can

unleash the next weapon in their arsenal; social media. Using platforms like blogs, Twitter,

Facebook and LinkedIn, marketers can help start social media conversations. When those

conversations lead interested prospects to the corporate website, they will be much more

likely to be converted into sales conversations if the appropriate calls to action are in place.

With the right mix of responsibility, everyone can be happy, even the CEO!

Turn your Request a Quote page into a Lead Conversion machine by having Sales do the work!

Visit LeadLifter.com to see how.

About the author

Dale Underwood is the Founder of LeadLifter and it’s flagship service EchoQuote. His

background includes 25 years of developing and selling Information Technology solutions to

large companies and Government. Mr. Underwood is now applying his sales experience to

help marketing teams within B2B companies find, convert and sell their products. He is an

advocate of using an unconventional sales technique based on self-service budgetary

pricing to help B2B marketers start sales conversations for their sales team.